Prophetic company has been sent forth to the earth to sound the alarm; their primary burden and commission is to stir the Church to repentance and point her once again to the next level of kingdom experience. In line with the prophetic thrust of Bible times, the prophetic ministry today is to provoke the kind of repentance that is deep and genuine and prepare the Church for the ultimate battle of the age.
The body of Christ will first return to God in
righteousness and true holiness, in preparation for the ministry of the last
harvest. This ministry will make ready a company of people fully prepared for
the Lord Jesus Christ, who will manifest His fullness in the saints first
before His physical return to earth. For thus says the Lord:
Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill
shall be made low, and the crooked path shall be made straight, and the rough
places plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall
see it, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. (Isaiah 40:4-5).
Over the years, no other body on the earth has frustrated
the efforts of God to complete His eternal plan as much as the Church herself. This
is because the body of Christ has not fully come to terms with the fact that
God will do nothing on the earth except through
her and is the only instrument
with which God has always intended to execute judgment on the devil and
his cohorts. The Church is the rod of God's strength with which He chastises
His enemies, and as one writer puts it, “the church is the conscience of God in
the earth”. But due to lack of knowledge of this fact, most Christians have
become sleeping soldiers on the line of duty, completely cut off from what God
is doing and wants to release to the earth through them.
So many are preoccupied with the personal and temporary
benefits they want to derive from salvation at the expense of God's eternal and
ultimate objective. These are victims of the age-long strategy of the devil (of
diversion and distraction) through preoccupation with personal needs above the
kingdom demand of Matthew 6:33, so much so that
what correctly reads thus:
But seek ye
first the kingdom
of God and His righteousness and ALL THESE THINGS shall be added unto you. It has, by the actions of so many believers, been changed
to:
But seek ye first
ALL THESE THINGS and the kingdom of God and his righteousness shall be
added unto to you. Denominational and
doctrinal dichotomies and claims to superiority have been exploited by
the devil to divide the body of Christ and confuse believers.
We have carried
on with a vision far short of God's plan
of a Church made up of believers in Christ, reaching across boundaries of
geography, race, social status and ethnicity.
This is the ministry Jesus left
for His Church; to become a body of able representatives, continuing in
Christ's stead, reconciling one to another and everyone to God, expanding but
compacted, and marching as a conquering
army to take the
stronghold of the devil's kingdom (study
Paul's revelation of
the Church in 1 Corinthians
12:12-28 and Ephesians 4:7-25).
With the benefit of hindsight, whenever God starts to
move His people to a new level, it is usually greeted with scepticism and
doubt. In most cases, such response is borne out of the fear of the unknown. As
is common with human beings, we are more comfortable with the familiar than
that which is unknown, even though it may hold a greater promise than the
former. The result is that while some
take the risk of stepping out into the unknown
by faith and eventually ascending to a higher dimension in
God, others prefer to settle in that which they are used to, thereby missing
out on the opportunity to advance in the kingdom experience and their walk with
God.
A clear picture of the situation described above is in John 7:37,44. Perhaps a
graphical presentation of the above text
would drive home the point being made here.
The Carpenter's Son
Decked in their magnificent robes, the priests sauntered
into the temple, amidst the people's unrestrained jubilation and excitement.
With them was a golden vessel containing water, which was poured on the altar in remembrance of God's miraculous supply of water from the
rock for the people of Israel in the wilderness. The atmosphere at the temple
that day was joyous as they clapped, sang and shouted. It was the last day of
the Feast of Tabernacles, celebrated in Israel yearly during autumn to
commemorate the journey of their forebears through the wilderness under
Jehovah's sovereign guidance.
Some distance away from this solemn scene stood the Son
of God, the reason for the whole celebration — unnoticed and unacknowledged.
For the people, He was insignificant to the event. Whether
He was present or
absent, it made
no difference. He was only a carpenter's son after all who came
somewhere from the backwoods of Galilee. Yet, He was the summary of the entire
ceremony.
As He stood, watching the scene from a corner in disgust,
His spirit was stirred. Suddenly, His mouth opened and like a trumpet, His
voice blared forth, saying: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and
drink. He that believeth on me as the scripture hath said, out of his belly
shall flow rivers of living water.” A hush fell all over the place as everyone
looked in the direction of the voice. It was the same Son of a carpenter from
Galilee. In a flash, as a sharp sword, cutting forth and back, the word from Jesus
cut through the multitude, piercing their hearts. The whole celebration was
brought to an untimely end, in confusion.
The tragic thing about the foregoing story is that the
people, engrossed in the activities of the celebration and lost in the euphoria
of the moment, had no idea of the event's significance. The Feast of
Tabernacles as celebrated by the people of Israel (in the scripture above) had
lost its meaning. It had become a vain worship.
Because God is
a spirit (John 4:24), worshipping Him effectively requires that the worshippers
come to the place where they worship in spirit and in truth. This demands that
the worshippers leave the level of their own human experience and the place of
a previous encounter and move up to the level where God is. And on each
occasion of worship, God desires to take the people involved to a deeper level
in the revelation of Himself to them. But when we are carried away by the
experience of a previous worship and reject moving up to a
new and deeper
experience, we relapse into
mere religious rituals and are cut off from the current workings of God.
And then God would seek a remnant and continue with His work. The trend
characterises the history of the Church.
Someone described religious tradition as honouring what God did in the past, but rejecting what
He is doing in the present. Failure to discern the times and the seasons of God
has made us (the Church), for too long a time, to pursue the shadow, leaving
the substance. This has distorted our perception and made it difficult for us
to determine God's present truth and position.
(To be Continued)
No comments:
Post a Comment